A somewhat controversal subject of interest, I hope. Something I bet a lot of people have noticed, too. BC and AD, BCE and CE, Lunar/Solar, or Universal?

All of the calendars and clocks I see say that the year is 2009. Why?

This calendar system may be convenient, but it is debatable whether or not our calendars should be based on the supposed birth of Christ. (Let's not debate whether or not Jesus existed in this thread please)

This brings into question, how would we represent our time if completely based on empirical scientific evidence and time-measuring methods?

So far, the closest I can get is a rough estimate between 13.5 and 14 billion years. And based on that esimate, this is all that I can assume about the current year: somewhere between 13,5??,???,??? and 14,???,???,???.

Perhaps we should base the current year on the age of earth since its formation or the age of our sun? 4.56?,???,??? ? Even so, estimates are still rough and precisely exact dates are very difficult to determine.

I'd say the cosmic or mean astronomical time. Like the Aztecs of ancient times.

In general, the Chinese have their own equivalent of ours (calendar wise), so we could go off of that.

But yeah, there is also that sort of temperal shift or tweak time-space thing. Supposedly reality bends around our atmosphere or ionoshpere? I am referring to an experiment conducted recently how we had 2 ultra precise clocks perfectly synced together, kept one on earth and sent one into space...that one comes back and they are out of sync.

This calendar system may be convenient, but it is debatable whether or not our calendars should be based on the supposed birth of Christ. (Let's not debate whether or not Jesus existed in this thread please)

There's the fact that the system has been adopted and administrated by the Western world for over 1200 years gives little reason for change. It may not be wholly accurate or proper, but it's the law of land, and changing it would cause massive confusion.

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Perhaps we should base the current year on the age of earth since its formation or the age of our sun? 4.56?,???,??? ? Even so, estimates are still rough and precisely exact dates are very difficult to determine.

Because no one wants to say "I was born in 4540000000.", or you could shorten it to "I was born in 4.54 x 10^9", but even then it sounds schlocky.

I was hoping for debate over different kinds of calendars and their practicality.

Perhaps, eventually, if scientific analyzation of the universe provides, a solid, precise date of the universe's age, this could become a more considerable thing to debate. What if scientific measurements of the ages of things in the universe were perfectly precise, for the sake of argument?

I was hoping for debate over different kinds of calendars and their practicality.

Considering the amount of time and effort it took to get most of the world to use the current system, I imagine it would take something truly profound to make us change again.

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Originally Posted by Arcesious

Perhaps, eventually, if scientific analyzation of the universe provides, a solid, precise date of the universe's age, this could become a more considerable thing to debate. What if scientific measurements of the ages of things in the universe were perfectly precise, for the sake of argument?

I would echo PastramiX's post.

Remember all the shenanigans that went on back in 1999? The masses were freaking out thinking that planes were going to fall out of the sky because when the clocks switched to 01/01/00 at midnight all the computers would choke on the double zeroes. Millions if not billions of dollars were spent making sure that everything was "y2k compliant". Now imagine that we waved a magic wand and decided that everything was going to a 12 digit year. Forget how much time it would take to get everyone to switch. Just think about how much money would be spent to do it. Worth it?

When everything is said and done, one complete rotation around our axis is a day and one full orbit around our sun is a year. We can slice, dice, and rename everything in between those two facts of life however we want, but if the current system isn't broken, why fix it?